From Tua to McCarthy: offseason questions for the eliminated playoff teams

Miami Dolphins: Is Tua Tagovailoa the guy?

The inquiry into what went wrong for the Dolphins this season will be long and painful. They can point to the freezing weather in Kansas City and the mountain of end-of-season injuries as reasons for why they fell at the first hurdle in the playoffs, but such thinking would ignore the issues that plagued the team during the rest of the season. They couldn’t beat good teams. They burned draft picks on players who couldn’t contribute down the stretch. A defense that promised to be one of the best in the league was erratic.

Yet those issues sit on the fringes of the biggest of them all: Should the team commit to Tua Tagovailoa as their long-term quarterback? We now have too much evidence that Tagovailoa is a fine point guard. Slot him into a point-and-shoot role with the ideal supporting cast and a great play-caller, and he can thrive. But when things go wrong – when he’s missing key pieces, when he’s forced to improvise, when his offensive line is conceding too much pressure – he folds.

Related: The NFL has never seen anything quite like the Eagles’ warp-speed collapse | Bryan Armen Graham

The options beyond Tagovailoa are limited. The team could look at a trade for Justin Fields. They could make a run at Kirk Cousins in free agency. But Cousins is coming off an achilles injury, and for all Fields’s promise, Tagovailoa is a more seamless fit in Mike McDaniel’s offense.

Miami has plenty of talent and a good coaching staff. But they’ve found themselves in one of the worst places in the NFL: quarterback purgatory. Tagovailoa is too good to move on from but too limited to overcome imperfect circumstances.

Dallas Cowboys: The end for Mike McCarthy?

It was just so quintessentially Cowboys. A 12-win season and a disastrous playoff loss. Long camera shots of a confused, irate Jerry Jones turning to his son in his suite. Stephen, do you have Belichick’s number?

This was not difficult to predict. For as long as McCarthy has coached, he’s crafted excellent offenses while overseeing teams that fall apart in the postseason. When things start going wrong in big spots, his teams collapse.

Dallas’ defeat should not fall solely on the shoulders of their head coach. Dak Prescott once again failed in the postseason. Dan Quinn appeared to spend more time preparing for head coaching interviews than studying the Green Bay Packers offense. Green Bay’s use of motion and pre-snap movement – the foundation of Matt LaFleur’s offense – left the Cowboys defense befuddled. Packers tight end Luke Musgrave averaged (AVERAGED!) 9.71 yards of separation per snap, a record in the Next Gen Stats era. You read that right: A tight end averaged nearly a first down of separation on each snap.

Still, being ill-prepared and unable to rebound from setbacks is a reflection on a head coach. Why did the team look so frazzled from the opening kickoff? Why were CeeDee Lamb and Prescott, the most productive receiver-to-quarterback duo in the league this season, bickering from the first snap until the last?

McCarthy has many excellent qualities. Guiding a team through the postseason is not one of them. It’s time for Dallas to move on and look for a new coach who can push a talented team over the top, although Jerry Jones, as ever, has different ideas.

Pittsburgh Steelers: Will they find a quarterback?

A toast, please, for another year of Mike Tomlin sustaining his ‘never had a losing season’ streak while getting bounced in the first round of the playoffs.

Rumors swirled in the aftermath of Pittsburgh’s postseason exit that Tomlin, with a year left on his contract, may quit. When asked about the state of his deal in the post-game press conference, he walked out before the reporter could finish their question.

Reports now indicate that Tomlin and the Steelers are working on an extension. Bringing Tomlin back is a win; he remains one of the best coaches in the game. But it doesn’t answer Pittsburgh’s thorniest question. They need to find a new quarterback – and Tomlin must sign off on a fresh approach on offense.

Few franchises are as insular as the Steelers. It’s time for Tomlin to bring in an outside voice to pair with a new quarterback. Kenny Pickett doesn’t have the tools to be a difference-maker in a conference that requires A-plus quarterback play. And while the Steelers are unlikely to make a splash by moving up in the draft, they should be the first port of call for any veteran quarterback looking to push through a trade this offseason or who is free to move in free agency.

The Steelers have young talent all over their roster. If you’re power-ranking Cousins destinations today (outside sticking in Minnesota), the Steelers should be at the top of the list.

Philadelphia Eagles: How will they fix the defense?

The end to the Eagles’ season was an abject failure. No team has fallen so far, at such speed, inside a season.

In some ways (sorry, Eagles fans), it’s helpful that it went so wrong at the end. If the Eagles had limped through a playoff game or pulled out a couple of wins at the end of the regular season, it would have papered over systemic cracks.

Philly needs a total reset. Whether Nick Sirianni should hang around as head coach or not is open for discussion, but the rest of the Eagles’ coaching staff should be feeling twitchy. Philadelphia failed to build a coherent offense throughout the season, leaning into their own worst habits with zero solutions to basic problems.

On defense, things were, somehow, worse. A ton of blame will be laid at the doors of Sean Desai and Matt Patricia, the two DCs tasked with piloting the unit. But to shovel the blame on that pair alone is a cop-out. The defense stunk this year for a whole host of reasons: poor team-building, philosophical flaws and an inability to master the details. The team’s pass rush vanished. The corners fell off a cliff. The middle of the defense – versus the run and pass – was a sieve.

Poor coaching should take up a decent chunk of the blame, but even solid coaching would not have stopped the likes of James Bradberry and Kevin Byard whiffing on simple tackles.

Ultimately, though, the Eagles built an ill-fitting roster to the staff’s defensive design. That’s as much on Howie Roseman, the team’s GM, as it is the coaching staff. Ironing those issues out in-season requires high-level talent and top-tier coaching. By the end of the season, the Eagles had neither.

Fixing the problems in one offseason will be tough – and a task made all the more difficult by the concerns that need addressing with the offense. It’s going to be a long offseason in Philadelphia.

Cleveland Browns: How do they address the offense?

Cleveland could not legislate for what happened against the Houston Texans. Their vaunted defense was pulverized by Houston’s young offense. Even when they got close to CJ Stroud, the rookie quarterback put on his cape and diced them up anyway.

A disappointing end should not overshadow an excellent year. The Browns proved they can be a playoff team and a divisional contender with above-average quarterback play. If Deshaun Watson can return and deliver a close facsimile of what Joe Flacco provided.

There will be an injection of new blood, too. The Browns announced on Wednesday they had parted ways with Alex Van Pelt, Kevin Stefanski’s long-time collaborator on offense. With Watson returning, the Browns need a new perspective. The Van Pelt-Watson partnership was largely a battle of two contrasting offensive philosophies. Because of his huge, fully guaranteed contract, Cleveland are committed to Watson, no matter how awful he looked for large chunks of this season. Finding a coach who’s more aligned with how Watson views the game will be the key to the Browns tapping into whatever potential is still left in the quarterback.

LA Rams: How aggressive will they be in the offseason?

The Rams overachieved this season. They pushed an excellent Lions team to the brink on the road in the playoffs with the youngest defense (by far) in the NFL. Matthew Stafford played as well, consistently, as any quarterback in the league this season, answering any concerns about his long-term health. In Puka Nacua, they found the ideal receiver to pair with Cooper Kupp.

Now the Rams hierarchy is left with a choice: do they push some chips into the middle and try to squeeze out the final drops of the Stafford-Kupp-Aaron Donald axis? Or do they continue to build toward the future, bringing an understudy to Stafford at quarterback and preserving some cap flexibility for the future?

The Rams enter the offseason in a strong position. They will have their full allocation of day one and day two draft picks for the first time in years as well as $40m in cap space, with the ability to open up plenty more.

They can pick any road they like. And given the resumes of Les Snead and Sean McVay, whichever one they pick will probably be the right one.